Wilmington has seen plenty of fun gatherings since things began to reopen, but one of the most lit reopening moments of 2021 remains the rock and pop band Kicking Bird's incendiary mid-April show at Palate. With much of the crowd still wearing masks at the outdoor gig, people danced their heads off, including a gaggle of kids (most of them belonging to one band member or another) who rocked out directly in front of the stage.
Kicking Bird -- which is led by the married couple Shaun and Shaylah Paul, who write songs and sing lead on different tunes -- has been playing locally for several years now. But by late 2019, right before the pandemic shut everything down, the band had established a reputation as one of Wilmington's most potent live acts thanks to hooky, exuberant rockers like "Radio Waves." Kicking Bird came roaring out of the pandemic with that rep fully intact, and has killed during sweaty shows at both Palate and Satellite.
On Thursday, Aug. 12, the band will play the pier at Carolina Beach's Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar along with local upstarts Pleasure Island. Kicking Bird also has a new batch of really fun songs, "The Covid Tapes," which they recorded late last year and released earlier this month.
Shaun Paul sings and plays guitar and Shaylah Paul sings and plays keys. Transplanted Brit Robin Cooksley plays lead guitar, with Tom Michaels (The Frondeurs) on bass and Greg Blair (Holland Shelter) on drums.
And while their mix of girl-group vibes, tweaky guitar solos, poppy hooks and amped-out riffs can make Kicking Bird sound like they could be the house band for a dance party straight out of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," Kicking Bird essentially traffics in syrup-free, powerfully delivered rock 'n' roll love songs.
"I think we're a pop band at heart, with punk tendencies," the stylishly mustachioed, heavily tatted Shaun Paul said over early-evening beers at the Satellite recently. "My number-one favorite music is The Supremes and The Ramones, and they're basically the same thing. That style of three-chord pop that's got a hook chorus, a couple of ooh-ooh-oohs in it, that's what I love the most. Everything, for me at least, kind of starts with that."
Shaun grew up in Wilmington -- his parents own the legendary Hot Wax surf shop, which he now manages -- playing in local bands and graduating from Hoggard High School. He and Shaylah first met in Chicago, where he was living at the time and where she's from, in 2008 when he was in a band with her ex-boyfriend. In 2009, they ran into each other at Chicago bar/venue The Empty Bottle and Shaylah gave Shaun a demo CD she'd recorded.
"I was like, You should check out my band,'" Shaylah said. "And he was like, 'You should check out mine.'"
They ended up playing together in a group called Chaperone -- "Pretty much as long as we've been together we've been in a band together," Shaylah said -- before the couple got married, had a now-9-year-old son and moved to Wilmington.
Shaun actually started Kicking Bird in Chicago with his brother-in-law, but the band only played a couple of shows there before he and his wife relocated. Shaylah initially joined in 2015 so that the band could use her songs and would have enough material to play a two-hour gig at Satellite.
She writes her own songs -- "What Would All the Other Girls Say (If They Knew What I Was Doing)," released last year on Fort Lowell Record's Wilmington-centric GROW: A Compilation in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter is a slice of girl-group heaven -- and also collaborates with her husband on his tunes.
When they take the songs to band practice, Cooksley will add ragged guitar riffs, and Blair or Michaels will sometimes change the direction of tunes with their rhythmic insight.
A multitude of influences are apparent, from the obvious girl-group and punk-pop leanings to boozy guitar rock and even, on the very groovy "Stacy London," some '70s-style classic rock vibes.
"We're just trying to listen to everything that's out there, old and new," Shaylah said.
"The Covid Tapes" finds the band reveling in rock songs about love that are very easy to love. The driving, hooky "Don't Stop!" has Shaun and Shaylah singing, "Don't stop/ Ever giving me what I want/ Baby, it's you." The rocked-out girl-group progressions of "Red Sonja" -- Shaun's ode to Shaylah's red hair? -- turn poetic when he sings about the "diamonds crushed back to coal in the middle of your eyes."
At the end of the day, Kicking Bird is a family affair. Not only are the Pauls given to to doing endearingly goofy, cute-couple Instagram posts together, but drummer Blair and guitarist Cooksley "and their families are like our best friends," Shaylah said. "Our kids are pretty much cousins."
As for their wider Wilmington family, promoter Catherine Hawksworth of the Modern Legend music and gift shop has been a big proponent of the band, whose high-energy show makes fans of most everyone who sees them play.
They should make plenty during their gig at the Ocean Grill, where the outdoor stage and laid-back vibe is a perfect fit for the band's expansive, often thrilling sound.
"It has been a dream of mine" to play there, Shaylah Paul said. "What more could you ask for as a band than to play on a pier" -- her husband finished her sentence -- "during fireworks!"
